by Nele Hempel-Lamer, Ph.D. & Cynthia L. Alvarez, Ph.D.
Ten years ago, the California State University embarked on a project to democratize data and developed the CSU Student Success Dashboards, mirroring the mandated reporting data collected from its campuses back to all employees in the system. With an eye on user-friendliness and welcoming of even the most novice data users, the data underwent an innovative visualization process that allows users to quickly understand the stories behind the data. With the CSU system’s focus on increasing graduation rates and closing equity gaps, the dashboards became a perfect departure point for a campus to better understand what is already working well and what needs to be improved to meet the CSU’s Graduation Initiative 2025 goals.
With such an invaluable resource at hand, the question then became: How can we promote broad adoption of this tool and support data-informed and equity-minded decision making for our faculty, staff, and administrators across the CSU system? The answer: launch the Certificate Program in Student Success Analytics!
The Analytics Certificate Program is a semester-long, team-based experience with a two-fold purpose: at the individual level, participants develop equity-minded dashboard literacy and bring this awareness and skill back to their areas of influence at the university; at the group level, cross-divisional teams break down their institutional silos and work collaboratively on identifying and implementing a data action project of strategic significance to their institution’s equity goals. This data-inspired experience is enriched by exposing participants to nationally-renowned guest speakers who share their best practices in student success innovation.
The program has been a breeding ground for a large variety of equity projects, ranging from course redesign and curriculum sequencing to investigations of re-enrollment practices and the establishment of mentoring programs for historically underserved students, just to name a few. The most recent cohort has also begun work in capturing the impact of COVID-19 on student success and the contributing factors of accessibility (or lack thereof) in this regard. Several past participants have secured grant funding to continue their projects, showing that the innovative work stemming from the program continues to progress even as the program has ended.
The Analytics Certificate Program and the CSU Student Success Dashboards have empowered participants to contribute to system-wide graduation and equity efforts and provided them the opportunity to partner with colleagues with whom they may have otherwise never connected. With every Analytics Certificate Program cohort, the California State University builds capacity towards evidence-based and equity-minded problem-solving in pursuit of reaching its ambitious Graduation Initiative 2025 goals.
Now in its fourth year and 600+ alumni strong, the Analytics Certificate Program has also garnered national attention and welcomed teams from outside the CSU system, including (but not limited to) the University of Northern Colorado, Southern University at New Orleans, and Stanford University.
If you would like to learn more about the dashboards or the Analytics Certificate Program, please contact us at AnalyticsCertificateProgram@calstate.edu.